Tuesday, June 16, 2009

some criteria of poetic analysis suggested by Lyn Hejinian

  • a poem is not an isolated autonomous rarified aesthetic object
  • a person (a poet) has no irreducible ahistorical, unmediated, singular, kernel identity
  • language is a preeminently social medium
  • the structures of language are social structure sin which meanings and intentions are already in place
  • institutionalized stupidity and entrenched hypocrisy are monstrous and should be attacked (Professor Cynthia Huff particularly loves this one)
  • racism, sexism, and classism are repulsive
  • prose is not necessarily not poetry
  • theory and practice are not antithetical
  • it is not surrealism to compare apples to oranges
  • intelligence is romantic (The Language of Inquiry)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

In the same order as Hejinian's list:

• Does she get credit for the obvious?
• Prove it.
• So writing must be more akin to assembling Legos than to expressing ideas or points of view. If so, why bother to write?
• Should stupidity and hypocrisy also be attacked in the avant-garde? If so, Ken Goldsmith better start wearing Kevlar.
• I agree and feel quite superior doing so.
• If a theory is (among other things), as my dictionary has it, "an idea used ... to justify a course of action," then of course it flows into practice. One just hopes to avoid enslaving one's practice to a theory (pace the Union of Soviet Writers et. al.).
• My favorite of these points.
• A minority view, though I share it.

Fun stuff!